Dennis+Perrin

Article Review submitted by Dennis Perrin

The Writer’s Toolbox: Five Tools for Active Revision Instruction - Language Arts, Vol 74, March 1997 by Laura Harper

This set of writer’s revision tools was borrowed from Barry Lane’s After the End, adapted, and utilized in Laura Harper’s middle school English classes. It could easily be applied at any level. She used the toolbox approach to revision skills to help her students “translate an abstract directive into a set of behaviors”. Specifically, she used the following revision concepts:

Questions Snapshots Thoughtshots Exploding a Moment Making a Scene

To illustrate Questions, she stood at the front of the room and said “Last month my boyfriend asked me to marry him.” Any questions? Of course, several questions followed. She then paired her students and asked them to read aloud their writing to their partner and ask “Any questions?” and subsequently use those to prompt revision details.

For Snapshots she knew writers “need ways to gather new information or to return to their inventory of information and draw upon it.” Show, don’t tell. By writing descriptions of what their partners had trouble visualizing doing by drawing a picture of it, literally or figuratively, students developed a strategy for elaboration. A camera symbol was chosen to be a prompt for this strategy.

Thoughtshots became the tool for helping the writers portray the “internal landscapes of their characters.” She chose three basic things authors do to accomplish this: character’s flashbacks, flashforwards, and brain arguments. She encouraged student pairs to examine their stories for places where readers would like to know more of what the characters were thinking and then apply an appropriate strategy.

Exploding a Moment - “Time to the writer is like play dough in the hands of a toddler” (Lans, 1993, p. 65) This strategy evoked writers to elaborate and identify time preceding, during or subsequent to snapshots or thoughtshots. Often this resulted in substantial expansion of breadth and depth to their stories. Encouraging her students to tell important parts of their stories in slow motion was reinforced by the writer’s “use of memory to unlock important information in the brain”.

Making a Scene (to re-see) - this process involves re-viewing their work again with different eyes. This diagnostic tool, like the mechanic’s lift, helps writer see their work from multiple perspectives. By reviewing the four main ingredients of their work, questions, snapshots, thoughtshots and exploding a moment, writers are able to evaluate frequency of occurence, depth and impact of each. Harper uses color coding to give students a visual map of each and percentages for another weighting indicator. Thank God she doesn’t prescribe an exact formula.

In conclusion, Harper wonders what methods are most effective in teaching these revision techniques. Additionally, she acknowledges her interest in finding tools that work with expository and persuasive writing. Certainly the above tools give writers more control of their craft as related to storytelling.